I started to study for CCNA with the “CCNA 200-120 Video Boot Camp With Chris Bryant” the course is amazing but there is a lack of pratice, so I decided to use GNS3 in order to build my (virtual) lab and understand more about network.

GNS3 is an alternative or complementary software tool to using real computer labs for computer network engineers, administrators and people studying for certifications such as Cisco CCNA, CCNP and CCIE as well as Juniper JNCIA, JNCIS and JNCIE. It can also be used to experiment features or to check configurations that need to be deployed later on real devices. I will be not talking about how to configure GNS3 but I can suggest you a good book on this topic.

To learn more from the network we’ll also used Wireshark.

Let’s start

An example of IPv4 protocol that is using broadcast would be an ARP request: when my computer is connected to my LAN, it needs to find the Layer 2 address of its default gateway (in my case 192.168.0.1), so my computer is going to broadcast an ARP request and the switch is going to forward that frame to all those devices so that everybody on that LAN (IP phone, Android box, etc).

But, in the case of an ARP request, when all these devices see that it’s an ARP request looking for the Mac address associated with 192.168.0.1, only the router is going to reply back, because only this router has that IP address. And the router will reply back to my PC saying, hey, this is my MAC address associated with the IP address of 192.168.0.1. The reply is not broadcast but unicast. So the initial request is broadcast and the reply that comes back is unicast.

Our scenario will be very simple, just two routers in direct connection, I’ll send a ping from the first router (now R1) to the second one (now R2), a ping it will initiate ARP to resolve the Layer 3 address to a Layer 2 MAC address.